Banana Yoshimoto

Everything in life has some good in it. And when something awful happens, the goodness stands out even more—it’s sad, but that’s the truth.

all it takes is one little wrong step and you end up feeling frustrated your whole life

If you’re always angry, always yelling at people, ultimately that just means you depend on them

This meant that for a while we both became extraordinarily sensitive to the ringing of our phone.

It’s a marvelous thing, the ocean. For some reason when two people sit together looking out at it, they stop caring whether they talk or stay silent. You never get tired of watching it. And no matter how rough the waves get, you’re never bothered by the noise the water makes or by the commotion of the surface—it never seems too loud, or too wild.

It didn’t matter if I was a kid or a grown-up. The old woman next door might have just died, the local doctor might have just had a baby, or I might be on my first date or have fallen out of love—none of this made any difference at all to the ocean; it remained just as it was, fanning out around the edge of our town and zooming quietly off into the distance, the tide rising and falling just as it always did, no matter what.

She was lovely, wonderfully pure. I bet she thought no one knew how easily she cried.

On nights like this when the air is so clear, you end up saying things you ordinarily wouldn’t.

Summer is almost over.

This knowledge left us a little quieter than before. For a moment I found myself wishing, really wishing that Tsugumi’s clothes would never ever dry, that our fire would never die.

For me the summer had been the concentrated essence of everything in the past that I loved and missed.